Cung Le, Rich Franklin and the problem of the future

I’m always suspicious of people who say they don’t think about the future. That’s why I couldn’t quite take Cung Le at his word when he told me he doesn’t worry about what will happen after his fight with Rich Franklin at the UFC on FUEL TV 6 event this weekend. It’s not that I think he was lying about being firmly rooted in the present. It’s just that it doesn’t seem totally possible to me.

It sounds cool. It makes you seem like you’re squeezing more of the juice out of life if you’re not constantly worrying about the next thing, but how do these people keep their thoughts from occasionally drifting into the future, whether it’s six months or 20 years from now? Do they not shower or sit in traffic? Don’t they ever go to the dentist? The present moment might be a great idea in theory, but surely everyone has some present moments that are just bridges to future ones. It’s just a question of how far those bridges extend.

For professional fighters, I think the answer is: probably not very far. That’s a generalization, but one that seems to hold up pretty well. Something about getting in a cage and beating other people up for a living seems to attract individuals who don’t spend much time thinking about what life will be like when they’re 50, which makes sense.

Still, when you get to the point that both Le and Franklin are at in their careers, it must be hard not to wonder what’s waiting for you on the other side of the rainbow. As Franklin told me not so long ago, he knows the end of his fighting days must be coming soon because people won’t stop asking him about it. At the same time, the more people try to get you to predict your own future, the more tempting it must become to retreat into the comfort of the present.

Take Le, for example. At 40 years old, he has to know he’s closer to the end of his fighting career than the beginning. He also has to know (or at least strongly suspect) that a UFC title shot is probably not in his future, regardless of how his bout with Franklin turns out.

And that’s fine. Le has a film career to fall back on. He has options. But as long as he’s still here, what does he tell himself when he’s gearing up for a fight like this? By his own admission, just getting healthy enough to fight these days is neither easy nor painless. Doesn’t that give him reason to wonder how much longer he’ll keep at it, and what might come after?

“I honestly don’t think about it,” Le told me when I put that question to him recently. “I take it one fight at a time, one day at a time, one movie at a time.”

The weird part is, the more Le explained this outlook, the more it began to seem like a consequence of the position he’s in rather than a trick to avoid confronting it. At his age and in his line of work, you never know what’s going to happen. There may not be a next time. Until you’ve safely reached the end of training camp, it’s hard to know for sure if there will even be a this time. If he started thinking too much about fights that may never happen, he said, “that’s a waste of a thought.”

Of course, here’s where we could argue that if you can afford to waste anything, it’s thoughts. They’re free, and they’re unlimited. Go ahead and waste them, Cung. There’s more coming.

We could also point out that planning for one possible future does not necessarily become a waste of time or energy if that future doesn’t materialize. Whether you save money for a rainy day or stockpile water and ammunition for an apocalyptic one, we all do little things to prepare for different situations, some of which we hope will never arise. The difference for the fighter is that there’s at least one day he can count on in his career, and that’s the last day. It’s also the day no fighter seems to want to spend too much time thinking about, almost as if thinking about it will hasten its arrival.

And, in a way, maybe it will. As Franklin put it when I spoke to him before his fight with Wanderlei Silva in June: “For the last two years of my life, I’ve been getting asked about retirement and it almost mentally puts you in the mindset that, every time you get asked about it, you come to the realization that, hey, I can’t outrun Father Time forever. You go through this kind of subconscious preparation of readying yourself for retirement.”

Either that, or you push the thought away and try to stay in the present. You tell yourself that the next thing isn’t worth thinking about until you get there. Then you don’t have to wonder where this next fight will leave you, or if it will change very much about the state of your career at all. You sure don’t have to concern yourself with the question of retirement, since that’s a future problem. Let Future Cung worry about that. Present Cung can’t be bothered.

It’s one way to live, anyway. If you’re going to do what Le and Franklin do for a living, and for as long as they have, maybe it’s the only way.

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